In brief

• America.gov's chatbot answers Minecraft prompts with a roughly 1,800-word rewrite of the game's End Poem, according to TechCrunch.
• The behavior is an easter egg rather than a hallucination, but TechCrunch says it doesn't know who added it.
• The site launched Sept. 29 and pulls together about 29,000 government websites, with process-completion features planned for 2027.

Ask the U.S. government's brand-new AI chatbot about Minecraft, and it stops sounding like a help desk. It starts sounding like it's having an existential crisis.

The bot lives at America.gov, which launched on Tuesday. FedScoop reported that it brings together information from roughly 29,000 government websites, so users can ask about things like booking a campsite, getting a passport, or replacing a Social Security card.

Mention Minecraft, though, and TechCrunch's Amanda Silberling found it delivers a monologue of roughly 1,800 words. It looks like a meltdown. It isn't.

The text is a rewrite of the Minecraft "End Poem," written by Irish author Julian Gough, which the game shows after you defeat the Ender Dragon and step into the exit portal.

The government version keeps the original piece’s structure and swaps the cosmic stuff for paperwork. In the passage TechCrunch published, the poem's signature love line turns into a line about a ZIP code.

So it's an easter egg, not a hallucination. Nobody yet has said who put it there.

That said, the White House has a pattern of borrowing cartoons and games for political messaging, and the rights holders who have spoken up say they never signed off.

In March, it posted Pikachu art from the game Pokémon Pokopia with "Make America Great Again" text, and The Pokémon Company said it was not involved and no permission was granted. White House videos about the Iran strikes also mixed in footage from Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball, and Yu-Gi-Oh!'s official X account said no one tied to the manga or anime was involved.

Halo's Master Chief voice actor, Steve Downes, demanded the White House remove his voice from a strike video he called "disgusting and juvenile war porn." After Trump posted an AI video of himself as Naruto on Truth Social in June, Japan's economic security minister, Kimi Onoda, warned that misuse can damage a work's image, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

A fan petition against the practice has gathered roughly 24,000 signatures, while Bandai Namco and Studio Pierrot did not comment and no manga creator has been reported responding.

Per CNBC, Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok power the platform. Edward Coristine, the 20-years-old DOGE alum nicknamed "Big Balls," was a lead engineer on the project.

The current version of the site gives users directions to government services. There are plans to let people continue processes on the platform itself and track their progress next year.